The Facts of Life (TV series)
| The Facts of Life | |
|---|---|
| File:Thefactsoflife.jpg The Facts of Life logo (Eastland was used as a backdrop from 1979 to 1983; afterwards Edna's Edibles and Over Our Heads provided the background) | |
| Created by | Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon |
| Developed by | Howard Leeds, Ben Starr and Jerry Mayer |
| Starring | Charlotte Rae ('79-'86) Lisa Whelchel Kim Fields Mindy Cohn Nancy McKeon ('80-'88) Mackenzie Astin ('85-'88) Cloris Leachman ('86-'88) Sherrie Krenn ('87-'88) |
| Country of origin | USA |
| No. of episodes | 209 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 30 Minutes |
| Original release | |
| Network | NBC |
| Release | August 24, 1979 – May 7, 1988 |
The Facts of Life was an American sitcom which ran on the NBC network from 1979 to 1988. A spin-off of the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, the series' original premise focused on the character, Edna Garrett (played by Charlotte Rae), as she became housemother to seven young girls at the Eastland Academy in Peekskill, New York.
Production
It was produced first by TAT Communications, then Embassy Television, followed by Embassy Communications (Norman Lear's production companies), and finally, Columbia Pictures Television (through ELP Communications). Today, Sony Pictures Television still distributes the rights to the sitcom.
From 1979 to 1982, the series was produced at Metromedia Square, and from 1982 on at Universal City Studios in Hollywood.
Plot
Originally a spin off of Diff'rent Strokes, the series featured the Drummonds' chef, Edna Garrett ([[Charlotte Rae]), as the headmistress of an all-girls school, Eastland Academy. In the show's first season, the show focused on the troubles of seven girls, and the action was usually set in a large, wood-paneled living room. The show was originally meant to be a summer series in 1979, but the head of programming decided to bring it back in early 1980. After a thirteen-episode run, the show was retooled extensively. Four of the original actresses, Felice Schachter, Julie Piekarski, Julie Anne Haddock, and Molly Ringwald, were written out of the show (although the four did make periodic appearances in the second season, and three returned in the final season for a "reunion of friends", mentioning Molly's character was unable to attend).
In addition to being den mother to the girls – wealthy, spoiled Blair Warner (Lisa Whelchel), chubby, fun-loving Natalie Green (Mindy Cohn), nosy Tootie Ramsey (Kim Fields) – Mrs. Garrett is the school dietitian as the second season begins, and a new student, street-wise Jo Polniaczek (Nancy McKeon), arrives at Eastland on scholarship. A turn of events leads the four to be separated from the other girls, and forced to work in the cafeteria and live together in a spare room next to Mrs. Garrett's bedroom. The focus of the show shifted to the four itinerant girls, and the action shifted to the school cafeteria and lounge.
Early episodes of the show almost always revolved around a central morality-based or "lesson teaching" theme. The debut episode of the show was extremely controversial in that it found the character of Blair Warner intimating that her schoolmate Cindy was a lesbian because she was a tomboy who frequently showed affection for other girls. Though the show never said the word outright, instead using terms like "that way" or "different", it was the first time a teen questioning his or her sexual preference had been shown on television.
The series was given a berth on the 1980-81 American network television schedule, and the show was a constant Top 30 hit for most of the early and mid-1980s. Memorable episodes included Tootie's meeting with Jermaine Jackson; an all-night study session; Tootie's encounter with a teen prostitute; and Jo and Blair's trip to New York, where spending time with old friends leads them to assess how Eastland has changed them. In 1983, Jo and Blair graduated Eastland Academy while Natalie and Tootie were still attending school there. To keep the four girls under one roof, Mrs. Garrett had her son Raymond buy a bakery for her, which she named Edna's Edibles. The four girls came to work for her and lived in one of the rooms at the attached house.
The show became part of NBC's much-watched Saturday night lineup in 1985, but by this time, the girls were now in their late teens and early twenties, and public interest was starting to wane. In an attempt to increase ratings, Mrs. Garrett's store, Edna's Edibles, was burned to the ground and was replaced with a pop-culture influenced gift shop that the girls ran together, called Over Our Heads. This phase of the show is notable for including a then-unknown George Clooney as a supporting actor.
The gift shop also sold a few records, and this offshoot business was the springboard for many appearances by popular groups and singers, such as El DeBarge, Michael Damian, and Stacey Q.
The ratings began to fall in 1986, when Charlotte Rae decided to leave the series and was replaced by Cloris Leachman, who played Mrs. Garrett's sister, Beverly Ann Stickle. During this time, Beverly Ann legally adopted Over Our Heads worker Andy (Mackenzie Astin), and Australian exchange student Pippa McKenna (Sherrie Krenn) attended Eastland Academy.
By the fall of 1987, the show, which had ranked in the Top 30 just two years before, now lagged behind, rarely ranking above #40 and dragged down the rest of the night's lineup as a result (which, at the time, had Top 20 hits in The Golden Girls and 227). In another attempt to raise the ratings, the show's writers created a storyline in which Natalie became the first of the girls to lose her virginity. Originally Lisa Whelchel was offered the storyline but she had become a born-again Christian in 1973, and premarital sex conflicted with her morals. The relative implausibility of Natalie having sex first out of all the girls, coupled with the equally implausible idea that all the women, now in their twenties, were not sexually active, contributed to the episode being a ratings dud. The show was eventually canceled in the spring of 1988. The producers had hoped to keep the show going by using the final episode as a backdoor pilot for a potential new spinoff in which Blair impulsively bought Eastland Academy, converted it to a coed school, and took on the Mrs. Garrett role by becoming the headmistress to a new generation of students who included Seth Green and future Oscar-nominee Juliette Lewis.
Recurring guest role students, in addition to including Cindy (Haddock), Sue Ann (Piekarski), Nancy (Schacter) and Molly (Ringwald), included Miko Wakamatsu (two episodes, in both of which she showed poor judgement), Geri Warner (Blair's cousin played by Geri Jewell). Others included Jo's and Blair's parents (played by Alex Rocco and Claire Malis, and Nicolas Coster and Marj Dusay, respectively), Natalie's and Tootie's mothers, as well as the boyfriends of the girls. Characters from Diff'rent Strokes also appeared in a few first and second season episodes.
Some quirky episodes took place in the last few seasons, evoking "The Golden Girls", the "Twilight Zone", and a sixties-ish episode guest-starring Bobby Rydell and Fabian.
Syndication, VHS and DVD availability
The Facts of Life aired in the United States on the USA Network and later on Nick at Nite and the Hallmark Channel. For the last two years, however, The Facts of Life has not aired on any nationwide cable channel.
Despite Diff'rent Strokes' huge popularity in the United Kingdom, The Facts of Life never aired on terrestrial TV there. A few seasons (referred to as "series" in the UK) were aired on one of the UK BSB satellite channels.
In Italy, a few seasons (1 to 5) were aired in 1983-1986, dubbed in italian, as usual, on the terrestrial TV "Channel Five" (Canale 5, a commercial TV company by Gruppo Fininvest, now Mediaset SpA); later, they were aired on several local commercial TV networks. The series name was changed to L'albero delle mele (it stands for "Apple tree", since the apple was a word popularly used as a symbol for teenage girls). In most of episodes, the original theme was replaced by some italian or english songs: "Scarpe da tennis" (sung by Patrizia Zanetti, seasons 1-3), "Please Please" (sung by Paul Qualley, season 1-3 reprise and season 5), "Amami... pensami" (unknown singer, season 4); all themes were produced by Five Records and sold on 45rpm disc. The Italian dubbed series were never sold on VHS.
In 1984 an italian movie called College was produced for theatre. Its plot slightly reminds The Facts of Life: a "Blair Warner"-like young lady, Arianna, performed by the italian actress Federica Moro, and a little girl wearing roller-skates (similar to Tootie in the first FOL season), were introduced in the movie.
In 2001, Columbia House released ten "Best of" volumes of the series on VHS (40 episodes in all). Since Sony, the company which now distributes the Columbia library, focuses more on DVDs, the tapes have been discontinued and can only be found on websites such as amazon and eBay at higher prices than they were originally sold.
The Facts of Life episodes (currently Seasons 1 and 2) can be viewed on Comcast's video on demand service in the United States.
The Facts of Life Reunion currently airs sporadically in the U.S. on the ABC Family Channel.
Seasons 1 and 2 were released together on DVD in the United States on May 9, 2006 along with new interviews with most of the cast including Season 1 originals Felice Schachter and Julie Anne Haddock (now Julie Anne Becker).
Made-for-television movies related to the series
- The Facts of Life Goes to Paris - A two-hour TV movie, aired September 25, 1982, in which Mrs. Garrett and the girls travel to France. It was added to the U.S. syndication package as four half-hour shows.
- The Facts of Life Down Under - A two-hour TV movie, aired February 15, 1987, in which the characters got involved in adventures in Australia. It also is syndicated as four half hour shows in the U.S. package.
- The Facts of Life Reunion - A two-hour reunion aired on ABC on November 18, 2001, reuniting Rae, Whelchel, Cohn, and Fields showing what their characters had done since the series' end. McKeon did not attend, due to scheduling conflicts with her television series The Division. Although, appropriately, she was mentioned in the movie as becoming a policewoman. Jo's husband and daughter did appear in the movie, however. The plot of the special revolved around the girl's adult conflicts: the main plot was that Natalie had two gorgeous men that she couldn't choose between, with sub-plots involving Blair suspecting her husband of infidelity, and Tootie (now going by the character's official first name, Dorothy) regretting her career choice. The reunion currently airs sporadically in the U.S. on the ABC Family Channel. In Italy, this movie was never aired on TV, but it was sold on VHS (called Quattro amiche, nuovi amori) in 2002.
Pop culture references
- On The Simpsons, in the episode Bart Gets Famous, Lisa Simpson imagines that she has cured all disease, ended war, and reunited the cast members of this show, "including long-time holdout Tootie."
- On The Golden Girls, in the third season episode Strange Bedfellows, Dorothy gives a sardonic answer to an obvious question by Rose, "No, Rose, I'm upset because they haven't rerun The Facts of Life Goes to Australia."
- On Family Guy, the show has been mentioned several times:
- Peter suggests a line of Transformers based on the characters
- Peter's campaign speech in running for Quahog school board is made up off the cuff of theme song lyrics, including this one. ("You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have...my opening statement.")
- In "SuperGriffins," the family commission a statue based on the first season episode in which Blair plagiarizes the Emily Dickinson poem Beauty Crowds Me 'Til I Die. To show the sculptors how he wants it to look, Peter changes into Mrs. Garrett's bosom, which then exclaims, in a Mrs. Garrett falsetto, "Girls, girls, girls!"
- Mrs. Garrett and Blair are also referenced several times in the dialog of different episodes.
- In the episode "Brian Goes Back to College," Brian watches an episode in which a dual-gendered Jo asks Mrs. Garrett if it's okay that his/her penis touched his/her vagina.
- During her I'm the One that I Want stand-up routine, comedienne Margaret Cho mentions the show - "My hair was so feathered it looked like an ass... It was actually more feathered than Blair's on "Facts of Life".
- On the NBC sitcom Scrubs there is a group of hospital administration workers that are a barbershop quartet, The Worthless Peons (played by The Blanks), who practice singing old television and cartoon theme songs late at night. One of the first songs they perform is the "Facts of Life" theme song.
- Comedy Central's Drawn Together parodies Blair and her cousin Geri in an episode entitled "The Other Cousin". In the episode, Princess Clara is first embarrassed by, then overprotective of her mentally handicapped cousin. In a direct homage to The Facts of Life, the cousin is named Bleh, a reference to how Geri tended to pronounce Blair's name.
- The series was parodied on a short-lived NBC summer series called The Rerun Show which took actual scripts from old sitcoms (only ones from within Sony/Columbia's domain) and then recreated them word-for-word using sketch actors who would impersonate each character/actor with great exaggeration. The most notable impersonation being that of comedian Paul Vogt playing Mrs. Garrett. Vogt would later bring that same impersonation to MADtv where he was a regular for a few seasons.